Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Cloud Computing – Documentation

Couple of days ago, Google released introducing video to new Google Docs. I found interesting not only functionality (0:38) and collaboration capabilities, but mostly the speed and response of the whole application, which runs remotely inside web-browser.

If you scroll to 1:00 min of that video, you will see response of table with couple of thousands rows, running from the "cloud". Any engineering documentation tool should run at least that fast.

Google offers variety of cloud based applications on their Apps Marketplace which can replace desktop applications and Google docs even supports scripts. Judging from positive feedback also very warmly accepted by users.

Application which can be used to compose engineering documentation is not yet available on the market ;)

As a Google fan and regular Google docs user, I am just thinking about how realistic is to compose final engineering documentation (including spreadsheets and pictures) using Google docs. If nothing, Google docs are still for free.

Technologies like this should be taken into account all the time when thinking about the future. It can easily happen, that upcoming 2010 version of Microsoft Office will be one of the last ones "boxed". Starting Office 2010, all the applications will have full cloud capabilities. In fact all the applications are able to run in web-browser and share data. Microsoft is now saying that they will migrate Office to some "software + service" model, and that can be only one step away from “only service”.

Microsoft Office Labs 2019 Vision looks rather crazy from today's perspective, but who knows..I can see some real background in it.